The Relentless Search for Home
A person can live in many places, but can settle in only one. You may not understand the difference until you’ve found the city or the town or the patch of countryside that sounds a distinct internal chord. For much of my life, I was on the move. I grew up in Texas in Abilene and Dallas, but as soon as the gate opened, I fled the sterile culture, the retrograde politics, the absence of natural beauty.
I met my wife Roberta in New Orleans. She was also on the run from the racism and suffocating conformity of Mobile, Alabama. In our married life, we’ve lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Cairo, Egypt; Quitman, Texas; Durham, North Carolina; Nashville, and Atlanta—all desirable places with much to recommend. We travelled the world. I have spent stretches of my professional life in the places you would expect—New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC—all cities that I revere, but not places we chose to settle.
Unconsciously, during those vagabond years, we were on the lookout for home. I nursed a conception of an ideal community—one that combined qualities I loved about other places: the physical beauty of Atlanta, the joyful music-making of New Orleans, an intellectual scene fed by an important university like Cambridge or Durham, a place with a healthy energy and ready access to nature such as Denver or Seattle, a spot where we could comfortably find friends and safely raise children.
I’m not saying that we couldn’t have been happy in any of the places I’ve mentioned, but something kept us from profoundly identifying with them. In 1980, I joined the writing staff of Texas Monthly in Austin. The population then was a little more than three hundred thousand—the current size of Lexington, Kentucky. Thirteen per cent of Austin residents were University of Texas students, another five per cent were faculty and staff. The only other significant presence in town was the state capitol. You could park free on most streets.
The Offbeat Austin of Yore
Of the limited offering of restaurants in town, we favored the Raw Deal, a greasy spoon where for five bucks you could choose between the pork chop and the sirloin, accompanied by red beans and Pabst Blue Ribbon. Above the register was the surly admonition “Remember, you came looking for the Raw Deal—the Raw Deal didn’t come looking for you.” Life in Austin was offbeat, affordable, spontaneous, blithe, and slyly amused, as if we were in on some hilarious secret the rest of the world was unaware of. Even then, the place had a reputation for being cool, but in my experience, it was just extremely relaxed, almost to the point of stupor.
There was a reason that the director Richard Linklater titled his 1990 portrait of the city Slacker. I was happy to be in Austin for a while—it embodied all the things I still loved about Texas: the friendliness, the vitality, the social mobility. Yet, it also stood against the mean-spiritedness of the state’s politics, despite being the capital city. Staying, though, violated my resolution to keep my distance from Texas. But Roberta declared that she was never going to live anyplace else. “Keep Austin Weird” was the city’s unofficial motto—you saw it on bumper stickers, guitar cases, and VW buses, often alongside another slogan, “Onward Thru the Fog.”
That one is harder to explain. In 1967, Gilbert Shelton, the creator of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comic books, imagined a character named Oat Willie—a scrawny, bare-chested guy with a Pinocchio nose, wearing polka-dot underwear and carrying a blazing torch, standing in a bucket of oats on wheels. Austin’s druggy counterculture adopted the character as its mascot; a popular head shop was named Oat Willie’s.
An origin story explained the character: Oat, a student at UT, was conducting an experiment on oat seeds when he was shocked by the news that President Kennedy had been assassinated. Thunderstruck, he failed to notice that his hand had brushed a control knob, releasing RADIOACTIVE ELEMENTS into his oat bucket. When Oat Willie climbed into the bucket to mash the oats, the RADIOACTIVE ELEMENTS caused his feet to fuse to the bottom. There was no remedy, so he attached wheels to the bucket like an early Segway. After various adventures, Oat Willie wound up in New York, arriving as fog smothered the city. People were stranded. “SAVE ME!” they cried. “WHERE ARE MY HANDS?” Fortunately, the oat bucket floated, and Oat managed to paddle to the Statue of Liberty and borrow her torch. As he guided New Yorkers to safety, he cried, “Onward through the fog!”
If this makes sense to you, you should have been in Austin back in the day. The city was pretty, with Lady Bird Lake dividing it between north and south. A burgeoning literary scene grew out of Texas Monthly, and hundreds of working bands filled clubs and dives. There were a handful of tall buildings downtown, mostly banks. I recall standing in the conference room on the top floor of the tallest one, a twenty-six-story tower, and looking out at Austin’s unobstructed downtown core: parking lots, warehouses, and a small commercial district. To the north was the gorgeous capitol, fashioned from pinkish granite, and beyond that, the University of Texas, whose buildings were made of limestone and Spanish tiles. To the south, across the river, was Travis Heights, the neighborhood where we lived at the time, and where Roberta taught at a public elementary school. West of that was Zilker Park and its hallowed swimming hole, Barton Springs. On the east side were the communities of color, segregated from the rest of the city by I-35, sometimes called the “Interracial Highway.”
For all its charms, Austin was beset by racial divisions that have undermined its character and its reputation to this day. Residents appreciated that Austin felt like a small town. Though we endured a lot of inconveniences—you had to change planes if you wanted to go almost anywhere out of state—it seemed worth the trade-off. We looked at Dallas and Houston with dread. The mantra was, “If we don’t build it, they won’t come.” I hoped that Austin, if it did grow, would initiate height restrictions that would keep the city humanely proportioned, like Washington or Paris. Who needed skyscrapers in Austin? Everywhere you looked, there was vacant or scarcely used land.
The Arrival of High-Tech Titans
Austin’s future was determined in January 1983, when Admiral Bob Inman, recently retired from the Navy and from serving as the deputy director of the CIA, was selected to head a novel consortium called the Microelectronics and Computer Consortium (MCC). Japan dominated the semiconductor-manufacturing industry at the time and had announced an ambitious effort to create computers capable of generating artificial intelligence. The Reagan Administration saw this as a serious threat, and MCC was the response. Twenty of America’s foremost high-tech companies—among them Microsoft, Boeing, GE, and Lockheed—would share resources to secure America’s hold on the future.
The first decision was where to locate this new entity. MCC was scheduled to exist for a decade, and the city chosen to host it would inevitably be transformed. The predictable choices would have been Silicon Valley or the Boston suburbs, but Inman—slender and succinct, with arched, skeptical brows—proposed an open competition. Fifty-seven communities bid. It was a commercial auction never before seen in America.
A site-selection committee of Inman and six CEOs held its first round of auditions. Mayors, governors, university chancellors, and business leaders teamed up to make their case. The committee examined various criteria: quality of life, cost of living, tax environment, quality of public education, commute times, airline connections, and access to graduate students in electrical engineering and computer science.
In the first round, San Antonio made the best presentation, led by its charismatic mayor, Henry Cisneros. The one thing he didn’t have was a research university. Inman told me, “The contestants narrowed to four: San Diego, Austin, Atlanta, and the Research Triangle.” Although Inman was a graduate of the University of Texas, he favored San Diego, a city he’d enjoyed during his Navy days. The team met at the University of California’s campus there. George Deukmejian, California’s governor, kept the committee waiting for twenty minutes, read a speech, then departed. “Such atmospherics mattered,” Inman concluded. “They would have been far better off if he’d never shown up.”
When the team visited Austin, Pike Powers, the chief of staff to Texas’s governor, Mark White, welcomed them to a breakfast in the grand atrium of the LBJ Library, hosted by Mrs. Johnson herself, who served quail. Inman recalled, “The team was impressed by Austin’s quality of life and affordability. Employees moving to the area were promised reduced mortgage rates.” What clinched the deal was the university’s commitment to provide a reliable stream of talent. UT offered to fund eight chairs in electrical engineering and computer science at a million dollars each. The university later sweetened its offer by funding thirty-two such chairs, but by then, the search committee had made its decision: Austin won, going away.
“It was a shock to both the East and West Coast,” Inman said. “It was a shock to Austin, too.” I remember the mixture of amazement and unease that greeted the decision. Back then, Austin was a uniquely liberal entity in Texas—the “blueberry in the tomato soup,” to employ the unappealing metaphor that prevailed before all the major cities in the state turned blue a decade or so ago. You could make the case that if you drew a line from Washington, DC, to San Francisco, Austin was the most liberal American city south of that border. At the same time, it harbored a reactionary resistance to change, especially when growth was a likely consequence.
Just as MCC was finishing up its search, a freshman pre-med student at UT was upgrading computers in his dorm room from stock parts and securing contracts to provide computers for the State of Texas. His name was Michael Dell. He dropped out at the end of his first year, having capitalized his company with a thousand dollars. His manufacturing team, he later recalled, “consisted of three guys with screwdrivers.” By 1992, Dell was the youngest CEO of a Fortune 500 company. He became Austin’s first homegrown billionaire.
The Relentless March of Progress
Dell reminded me that Austin already had a cluster of tech companies. “In the sixties, IBM came,” he said. “In the seventies, you had Texas Instruments and Motorola.” In 1986, three years after MCC set up in Austin, Sematech, another consortium created to boost semiconductor manufacturing, arrived, bringing along Robert Noyce, the visionary co-founder of Intel. It was like “Benjamin Franklin moving to Austin,” Dell told me. Real wealth marched into town, first with the “Dellionaires” who invested in Dell in its early years.
Thanks to Roberta’s urgent counsel, we became modest investors. No longer were the capitol and the university the city’s major economic forces. Austin’s cultural appeal wasn’t the only lure for tech giants; Texas bestowed fabulous tax incentives. Other cities longed for such an influx of tech-savvy professionals, but Austinites were ambivalent about the economic bounce.
People moved to Austin because of what the city was—but in the act of moving, they helped obliterate that history. Treasured music clubs were razed to make room for apartments and office buildings. The once crystalline Barton Springs became clouded by runoff from development. The dignified capitol was shadowed by glassy towers that reflected the Texas sun, making sidewalks sizzle. Traffic and crime and other big-city stressors made the old days appear more glorious than they actually were.
Every new Austinite brings a bit of the culture he left behind. No matter how interesting the newcomers are—their attitudes, their preferences, their prejudices—they become novel flavors in the cultural stew. Austin will never taste the same.
The Restless Search for Home, Revisited
Other Austinites I spoke with had gone through similar searches for an ideal home. Luke Warford grew up in Rhode Island, then lived in New York, Cincinnati, and London, where he went to grad school in economics. He spent a year in Ethiopia. “Every extra dollar I made in my twenties, I spent on travel,” he told me as we sat in an East Austin coffee shop. A thirty-three-year-old marathoner with dark-brown hair and beard stubble, he was wearing a memorial baseball cap for the Uvalde massacre. After working at Facebook in Silicon Valley, he decided to put down roots. “I wanted to go someplace I could have a really big impact and where there’s a lot of opportunity and a place that’s young and active,” he said. It came down to Denver or Austin. The hike-and-bike trail around Lady Bird Lake—”the most beautiful running spot that you could possibly imagine”—sold him.
Another factor in his decision was politics. “Texas is going to be the most politically consequential state in the next decade,” he said, and he wanted to be a part of that. Texas, in his assessment, is “thirty million persons governed by entrenched assholes.” Changing that would be a huge undertaking, but Warford likes solving big, intractable problems. He went to work for the dispirited and ineffectual Texas Democratic Party, spending a year and a half there before announcing that he was running for railroad commissioner. “For a young man intent on changing the world,” the railroad commission—its quaint name notwithstanding—”has nothing to do with railroads. It regulates oil and gas in the state. There’s no more consequential entity in America for managing energy.”
Eduardo “Eddie” Margain, an investor in real estate and in oil and gas, has lived in Austin for fifteen years. He has been buying signature buildings downtown, including the noble Driskill Hotel, “the grande dame of Texas.” Margain and I met at Q2 Stadium, where the new soccer team plays. He is intense and energetic, with a narrow face and pale-blue eyes, his hands conducting the conversation. “We sold out every game from the start,” he told me. His family came from Monterrey, Mexico, in 2008. His father-in-law, Alejandro Junco de la Vega, owns a media conglomerate whose star property is the center-right newspaper Reforma.
Margain, having seen how violence can take over a country—newspaper offices were firebombed, and the family lived under constant threat—has become the head of the Greater Austin Crime Commission. Austin remains one of America’s safer cities, but crime has been rising. In the fall of 2020, the city council defunded the police’s budget by a third. It also suspended new cadet classes, and although instruction has resumed, the city is woefully short of officers. “There’s no visible traffic enforcement, and since 2021, the murder rate has hit a historic high.” But Margain is undaunted. “If we fix public safety, we’re going to be the best city in the world,” he told me.
The Influx of Disruptive Tech Titans
Joe Lonsdale, a venture capitalist who co-founded Palantir, the data-analysis company, and started the investment-technology firm 8VC, came to Austin from Silicon Valley. “I like Texas,” he told me. “There’s this spirit of the Texas frontier—strong people confronting challenges and doing so boldly.” That’s the myth he grew up with, but it still has the power to summon entrepreneurs like Lonsdale. He worries that Austin’s rising cost of living disenfranchises the very people who made the city so distinct. “You want to have lots of hippies around,” he said, “because they make the music and the food better. But you just don’t want them in government.”
After attending Stanford, Lonsdale became an intern at Peter Thiel’s PayPal and got to know three future billionaires now living in Austin: Luke Nosek, Ken Howery, and Elon Musk. Musk has claimed to live in a forty-five-thousand-dollar tract house in Boca Chica Village at the bottom tip of Texas to be close to his rocket company’s launch site, but he’s also been seen staying in friends’ mansions in Austin. Called the “PayPal mafia,” they have brought with them the disruptive self-image and libertarian politics that characterized their Silicon Valley ventures.
Palantir, which is based in Denver but has offices in Austin, typifies the moral complexity of the current tech culture. The company has been criticized for allowing US immigration authorities to use its sophisticated software to arrest parents of undocumented children, and for working with the NSA to improve software that the agency used to spy on American citizens. But during the pandemic, the government tracked outbreaks by analyzing COVID-19 data with Palantir software, and the company’s algorithms are reportedly being used in Ukraine to monitor Russian troop deployments.
The Allure of the Austin Lifestyle
One of Austin’s assets, Lonsdale told me
